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FOR many observers, 2011 was a terrible year in American political discourse, with the summer's standoff over the debt ceiling representing a new low for partisanship and obstructionism. In a very interesting essay in the New York Review of Books, Mark Lilla argues that what's happened over the past few years is nothing less than "the mainstreaming of political apocalypticism", with grave consequences for the country. It's not an easy argument to...

A lot of people make a mistake when they attribute alleged inability to meet certain public policy objectives to lack of money. This is a point I've been wanting to make for a long time, but in order to make it I needed to find an example of someone making a truly absurd version of the error. Fortunately, Liquat Ahmed's Lords of Finance delivers quite early on. It's conventional nowadays to mock pre-WWI European elites for believing that a genera...